Jobs in rural Iowa are important, but the state's first duty is to some of its most troubled children.

Dec. 15, 2013

Mark Marturello/Register Illustration from file ph

Written by

The Register’s Editorial Board

Coming Monday

Gov. Terry Branstad is using his administrative authority to effectively close a 93-year-old state institution in Toledo. Some lawmakers are upset he acted without consulting them. Lawmakers have an opportunity in January to get involved in decisions about what to do with aging state institutions that house few residents. They can revisit the wisdom of maintaining four state-run mental health institutes that once housed 6,000 residents and now only serve an average of a few hundred a day. ON THE OPINION PAGE

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The Iowa Juvenile Home in Toledo is responsible for providing care, education and treatment to Iowa youth who have no other place to go. Some of these kids have been in trouble with the law. Some are judged by a court to be “in need of assistance” because they were abused or abandoned. By now, most Iowans have heard about problems at the home, which is operated by the Iowa Department of Human Services.

Workers kept at least three girls in small, concrete block cells for months at a time, according to an investigation by Des Moines Register reporter Clark Kauffman. Employees resigned after this newspaper asked for a copy of a slide show presented during a holiday party at the home. One slide depicted a skeleton lying in an isolation room with a caption that said, “Dr. Joan was supposed to assess this youth three days into her suspension. Guess she forgot.” Four employees were fired over allegations they abused or used excessive force while restraining children there.

Gov. Terry Branstad appointed a task force to make recommendations on the institution. Among the members’ suggestions: The state should serve only delinquent girls at Toledo and move non-delinquent youth to private facilities elsewhere. Implementing those recommendations would leave only a couple of children at a 27-acre facility with 13 buildings and 93 employees.

On Monday, DHS administrators announced that the 21 girls who remain at Toledo will be relocated and all state workers there will be laid off, effective Jan. 16.

Yes, the governor moved quickly and didn’t formally seek input from lawmakers. Unfortunately Iowans will lose jobs. It is frustrating that taxpayer money was used to pay for millions of dollars in renovations in recent years at a campus that will now be essentially closed. The governor is “sending kids to programs that previously admitted they couldn’t handle these girls,” said State Sen. Jack Hatch, D-Des Moines. “Will they receive better treatment?”

These are all legitimate concerns. But the governor did the right thing.

The current workers at Toledo are many of the same people who remained silent for years about problems that were occurring there. The closure of the home forces the state to make changes now instead of debating what to do next. Such a debate would have been riddled with politics and could have taken several years. No one knows if Toledo could have been “fixed,” but Iowa’s children can’t wait while policymakers try to figure it out.

Closing the facility is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of Iowa doing what it should have done a long time ago: figuring out how to best serve the most troubled Iowa children.

To successfully do that, Gov. Branstad should keep in place the 5-member task force he created to make recommendations about Toledo. This group is made up of professionals with extensive experience in child welfare. Members have operated with transparency and provided an opportunity for public comment at every meeting. They are familiar with the issues that will need to be addressed when the state no longer operates a facility considered the “placement of last resort” for youth.

One of these issues is where to place delinquent girls who may pose a risk to others and have been ordered by judges to a secure facility. “What does Iowa do with no training school for girls?” asked task force chairman Jerry Foxhoven.

Of the 21 remaining girls at Toledo, 11 are delinquent. Some may move to the state’s psychiatric medical institutes for children, said DHS spokeswoman Amy Lorentzen McCoy. If the state plans to create a “little Toledo” in the wing of a different state institution, there must be adequate oversight of the program.

Also, private facilities in Iowa won’t serve the youth currently at Toledo under the current payment arrangements, the task force said in a report in October. The state may need to pay private providers more to take care of these girls. Any money saved from laying off staff at Toledo could be redirected to taking care of the kids.

These are among the many details that now need to be sorted out. The task force is necessary to make sure that happens. Iowans should have assurances there is monitoring of not only the girls moved from Toledo now, but all children who enter state care in the future.

For at least 17 years, Toledo used seclusion as a way to control children, sometimes in violation of court orders. Warehousing kids in concrete cells for days and weeks at a time deprived already troubled girls of education and socialization.

Debates in the Legislature about closing the facility would have wrongly ended up focusing on the loss of state jobs in rural Iowa. Instead, the focus needs to be on doing what’s right by Iowa kids who are in the custody of the state. The state must provide them with the best treatment and education possible. Toledo couldn’t provide it.

Now it’s up to the Branstad administration to ensure better care is provided elsewhere. That will require money, transparency and involvement of the task force.